(Editor’s note: During the past several years, various documents regarding The Other Side of the Wind have been shared with Wellesnet. Perhaps none is as fascinating as this undated, 10-page typed document in which Orson Welles explains the storyline and its principal theme. It was likely created to woo potential investors in the 1970s. Unfinished at the time of his death in 1985, the footage was edited decades later by Bob Murawski under the direction of Peter Bogdanonich. Frank Marshall and Filip Jan Rymsza for Netflix in 2018.)
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND
The basic conception of the story line, together with the author’s ideas concerning its principal theme
by Orson Welles
This film is cast in a form which is not quite like any other form in any other film before it. It is, in fact, two films, moving together, sometimes almost simultaneously.
The first of these …
The record (apparently a “documentary” record) of a single day in a man’s life.
(There is no aspect of dramatic art – however modest – which is not based on certain conventions. The filmmaker works like a novelist. His view is godlike in the sense that it pretends to be omniscient. The assumption is that he knows everything about his story and that what he chooses to tell is the sum of his own choice of materials. In this film we adopt a new convention. We are eliminating the godlike eye of the filmmaker – at least apparently so).
The first of our films (the two of which together compromise a single film) is supposedly made up of “documentary” material, photographed and recorded during the last hours of a man’s life. The man is J.J. Hannaford – known as “Jake” Hannaford to almost everyone, even to people who never met him – even to the public.
Like Hitchcock, he was more than a name. Like Hemingway (who was so much like him) he was, quite outside of his work, a world celebrity. As a film director, he stands among the very few – the half dozen or so – whose place in history would seem to be secured for all time, and who deserve, past all argument, to be called “great.” As versatile as Hawks (but more of a poet), as poetic as Ford (but less sentimental), Jake Hannaford belonged to their generation but not really to their world. Like Rex Ingram (now an all-but forgotten name) Jake was a wanderer. He worked, for the most part, as far from the California studios as he could manage. He worked for Hollywood, but took his cameras all over the globe. His preference was for distant and difficult locations – for the exotic – for the ends of the earth. And when he wasn’t in big game country, in the frozen tundras or steaming jungles, the place where he felt most at home was Spain (again, like Hemingway, whom he resembled in so many ways).
His home in America was a ranch house in the desert and it was here that the “documentary” material, which makes up our portrait of this man, was filmed and recorded. The occasion was a birthday party, given for him by one of his oldest and most devoted friends, that fabulous “femme fatale” of the early talkies, Zarah Valeska. Zarah had decided that it was time for the new people in Hannaford’s profession to meet and talk with him. That profession was filmmaking, of course, and he belonged to that level where it is not a profession so much as an art. There is certainly no record of Hannaford ever referringto himself as an artist. He was totally without pomposity. An intellectual, whose affectations were those of the phillistinel his culture was very wide (if not deep) but he liked to pretend that he was virtually illiterate. Such a man, of course, would be very much at odds with the new generation of filmmakers who despise the cinema as an industry and respect it only when its aspirations are for something more “serious” than entertainment. The birthday party which Zarah Valeska arranged for her old friend was, therefore, intended as a mutual confrontation between Jake and these new filmmakers of a younger generation. In this – as in almost every other respect – the party was a failure.
This film is the record of that failure.
The Film Festival in San Francisco had brought a number of the best and brightest movie people from all over the world. These – together with their American equivalents – were all invited to Jake Hannaford’s birthday party. With them came a number of serious journalists, photographers from picture magazines, television reporters and several documentary camera crews.
It is our convention that this story is an assembly, made up from their photographs and from film and television and sound tape. There is, therefore, no single point of view – no single “author.” Nothing is seen or heard which was not recorded (in various “documentaries”) by these journalists. We are given, therefore, not so much a narrative as a series of impressions. The journalists are witnesses, and the story – insofar as it is a story – is the sum of their testimony. The verdict is open.
As two separate elements are often pursued in the same work of music, two films proceed in counterpoint in this single film. As we have said, the first is the documentary record of the last day of Hannaford’s life.
The second, Hannaford’s own motion picture — (the one he was working on before his death) is seen during the action of the other. It is screened for Hannaford’s guests in the private projection room at his ranch. Those who view this film are characters in the other film – in the documentary story. The action of that film is an integral part of the “documentary”.
But Hannaford’s film has an existence of its own. It tells its own separate story.
On a certain level each film is a comment on the other.
Hannaford’s film tells a simple story of a boy and girl (the outlines of which need not detain us here) and was conceived as a sort of dream. Jake himself would have dismissed the word “surrealism”; but we will have to use it ourselves to describe his last motion picture.
As a filmmaker he was always adventurous – often quite frankly experimental. He made many popular pictures, but even his box-office entertainments were informed by a questing spirit, a daring readiness to move into areas as yet uncharted, to find fresh forms and new dimensions. Not that he was an “arty” director (he hated that sort of thing), but simply that he was by nature an explorer, a scout, riding well ahead of most of the others, always close to the frontier.
His last film is, therefore, a very new sort of motion picture – (by an old director) – an experiment, and also a reflection of its maker.
His hero and heroine find themselves – after a series of adventures – “camping out” in what was once a movie studio, among the crumbling plaster wreckage of Chinese villages) Persian palaces and New York slums constructed, long ago, for long-forgotten films. These two come to the end of their own story in a strange, unearthly world) where nothing is real, or was ever real, and where now even the illusion of reality is falling into dust. They have come, in effect, to the ruins of Hollywood.
At the end of everything, Hannaford – driving off in his car – crashes in flames.
Before this happens we have learned that as a man he was close to the end of his road. What we do not know is whether that end was of his own choosing. In the final analysis, suicide is quite as banal as a car accident. This is then the least important of the Hannaford mysteries …
He made, of course, more movies than he himself can remember. Cinema historians, laboriously tracing the details of his long and rather hectic career, are still not certain that their records are complete. Jake himself was always rather less than cooperative. Journalists found him evasive; yet he could never have been called modest. But he was never a braggart. Quite possibly, the real key to this evasiveness was boredom.
It is true that old men are often bored with life. But every word of that statement is wrong as it applies to Jake Hannaford. First, the “old man” part of it. It is not enough to say that he didn’t act old. Nowadays, few old people “act their age.” We see them everywhere capering rather jerkily about like clockwork adolescents who’ve been left out in the rain. Jake was not one of those. He did not seem middle-aged when he was middle-aged. He was never, in fact, exactly what one expected him to be. Right up to the end he avoided analysis.
Tags? Labels? He has been called just about everything. His admirers have strained the vocabulary of adulation to the bursting point, and his enemies – who are even more numerous – have long ago run out of insults. The truth is, you simply can’t put a tag on him – not and make it stick. He took pleasure in that. Some called him “slippery,” but there’s the hint of wriggle in the word that makes it less than appropriate. Jake never wriggled. In the style of the torreros who were his intimate friends, he permitted the horns of the tag — stickers to slip past him – even to tear away an occasional scrap of gold tinsel – always without compromise, without shifting his ground.
There are those who maintain that he was, indeed, a sort of matador – a killer – and a tricky one at that. These enemies (and he had many of them) remember the
names of actors he all but destroyed. Even his partisans — who prefer to speak of all the great stars he created – must admit to the gay precision of his work with the banderillas. “Bored with life.” Can such a tag be stuck on someone who was always so consumed with interest in everything life had to offer him?
Perhaps the ultimate paradox concerning this most paradoxical of men is this – that Hannaford may have come finally to the point where he was bored with Hannaford. This simple fact may lie at the heart of the mystery of his suicide … if it was a suicide.
It is not surprising perhaps, that in an age when irony is in such short supply, a man whose whole outlook was so unfailingly ironic, was called a cynic. But he was no such thing. He was, quite cheerfully and totally, a pessimist. And this was misread again as cynicism. The truth is that his spiritual stance – one of his best kept secrets – was aristocratic. For such a man cynicism is vulgarity. (Not that Jake would have ever put it into those words). His style was benign, even benevolent, (someone once called him an “unfrocked cardinal”). He had humour, he was a wit; but the wit and humour were always cruel. He was a cruel man. He was also passionate. But the passions were all very cold. Claude Chabrol described him as a “cat that walks like a bear.”
He was a man of many masks. The journalists at his birthday party seek to pull them off. Do they succeed? The real mystery, perhaps, is not the nature of his death but the nature of the man– the ultimate truth about the artist, the mask-maker behind the musks. If, indeed, he said everything about himself in his art, is there anything left for anyone to say about the artist?
Hannaford was a creator of images. They had their own life on the movie screen. Was there anything behind them, behind the screen? – anything that finally matters … except another mask?
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